Originally published in Arthur No. 34 (April, 2013)

Zig-Zag Zapped
Orange County, California psych rockers FEEDING PEOPLE left the church and entered the void. Now they’ve returned to sing their tales in glorious reverb. Chris Ziegler investigates.
Photography by Ward Robinson

Feeding People come from the Adolescents’ “Kids of the Black Hole” country, the un-Disneyfied side of Orange County, California. They met in a church band and then spiraled off into the cosmos, putting out a record in 2010 on heroic hometown emporium Burger Records that out-freaked almost all the other extremely accomplished freaks already on that label. It sounded like the battle of all battles—trying to go psychedelic in a place where it would have been so much easier to go plastic.

Don’t get me wrong. They weren’t obviously frothing at the mouth. If you didn’t know your contemporary Orange County bandspotting minutiae, you’d probably have a hard time in the wilds of Fullerton figuring out who exactly is a Feeding Person and who is in Audacity or Cosmonauts or who works buying used vinyl at Burger, indisputable ground zero of Southern California’s teenage weirdo renaissance. They’re all on the thrift store/swap meet vibe, kids who spend weekends prying out the last surviving cool shit from the tar pits of suburbia. Maybe that’s Goodwilled punk and psych records or leather boots, maybe just a decent jean jacket. (Plus band shirts bought from the band, at the show, of course.) You wouldn’t be able to tell if Feeding People were there to play or just there to watch if you saw them hanging out by a stage.

Today, founder and singer Jessie Jones and guitarist Louis Filliger are the last ones left from the first line-up of Feeding People. And even though they’re 72 hours away from the release of their new album, Island Universe, they haven’t quite left that earlier era behind. It’s like they’ve still got ash and dust on them. They’ve … experienced things. They’ve got extra energy so they can muster extra quickness, extra brightness so they can see a little farther into the dark. When they start to talk, it’s like a door is thrown open—you’ll feel the air rush past, hear the slam.

Jessie is dark-haired, slim but not slight because of some not-quite-nameable quality of presence. Even two tables away, it seems like she’s right next to you. She talks less than Louis, but when she does, everybody else shuts up. Louis has the answers, the theories, the explanations. During the French Revolution, he says, they’d start their speeches with certain words that would really HIT. (He pushes some extra power into the word—THUD.) He’s been waiting to get these stories out, he says.

Everybody with sense who writes about Feeding People talks about how something else is coming THROUGH this band. They channel, they incarnate, they let something strange and cosmic come scorching through. It’s like Philip K. Dick—in 1974, he got zapped by some power cosmic just five driving minutes from where the Burger Records stand is now, and it led him to write two million words searching for ultimate truth. (“A: The enigma remains. Q: We have learned nothing,” Dick decided.)